When allowing unmanned vehicles, which haul excavated ore, such as dump trucks to autonomously travel in a surface mine or the like, it is needed to control the unmanned vehicles so that they will not interfere with manned vehicles such as bulldozers and graders that keep up roads, sprinkler vehicles that sprinkle water to avoid raising dust, and light vehicles that perform patrolling tasks.
As a technology for such control, Patent Document 1, for example, discloses the following configurations: “An unmanned vehicle finds out a circle defining a distance obtained when a manned vehicle finally acquired (received) by an inter-vehicle communication device moves from a position P (position at a certain point of time) based on the positional data of the manned vehicle to a prescribed point of time in the future at a maximum speed as a radius around the position P on the basis of the position P and estimates the area of a programmed traveling route in the circle as the existence range of the vehicle. The unmanned vehicle judges whether its own vehicle position interferes with the circle or not. (An extract from the Abstract)”.